Someone I love is suffering

Someone I love is suffering, wrote a friend. What can philosophy tell me about my responsibilities to help them?

I want to begin thinking about this by sharing a story from the philosopher Raimond Gaita. It’s long-ish, but it’s beautiful, and points to something both deeply mysterious and profoundly practical.

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"In the early 1960s when I was seventeen years old, I worked as a ward assistant in a psychiatric hospital … It reminded me of some of the enclosures at Melbourne zoo. When patients soiled themselves, as some did often, they were ordered to undress and to step under a shower. The distance of a mop handle from them, we then mopped them down as zoo-keepers wash down elephants.

"The patients were judged to be incurable and they appeared to have irretrievably lost everything which gives meaning to our lives. They had no grounds for self-respect insofar as we connect that with self-esteem; or, none which could be based on qualities or achievements for which we could admire or congratulate them without condescension. Friends, wives, children and even parents, if they were alive, had long ceased to visit them. Often they were treated brutishly by the psychiatrists and nurses.

"A small number of psychiatrists did, however, work devotedly to improve their conditions. They spoke, against all appearances, of the inalienable dignity of even those patients. I admired them enormously. Most of their colleagues believed these doctors to be naive, even fools. Some of the nurses despised them with a vehemence that was astonishing …

"One day a nun came to the ward. In her middle years, only her vivacity made an impression on me until she talked to the patients. Then everything in her demeanour towards them—the way she spoke to them, her facial expressions, the inflexions of her body—contrasted with and showed up the behaviour of those noble psychiatrists.

"She showed that they were, despite their best efforts, condescending, as I too had been. She thereby revealed that even such patients were, as the psychiatrists and I had sincerely and generously professed, the equals of those who wanted to help them; but she also revealed that in our hearts we did not believe this.”

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